Damn this was good. I reckon that Harviestoun must be my favourite brewery at the moment. Just delicious.
Harviestoun Bitter & Twisted
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Author Archives: Stewart Smith
Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale
More Vegan beer from Samuel Smith’s! I can heartily recommend their Nut Brown Ale to anyone who’s ever had a Newcastle Brown and wanted a bit more. This isn’t overwhelming and thoroughly enjoyable. I’m finding that this seems to be a good pattern in their beers – flavourful, drinkable and not overwhelming. You could easily pair this with food too… and I’m either craving lentils or they’d go well with it. The back of bottle suggests Thai, Malaysian and Chinese food, which would also go pretty well. There is a societal bias towards matching wine with food, and beer is often supremely overlooked. This is rather sad as the range and depths of flavours of bere is wide and varied, and pretty much always supremely more affordable. You can probably easily name several wines that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars; try naming a single beer that costs more than $100 for a six pack.
Edit: it’s not this beer that costs a lot, this one is quite reasonable. The expensive one is of you can’t easily get to a Belgian monastery.
Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout
Another Vegan beer from Samuel Smith with the nice Vegan symbol on the back and everything. This isn’t a heavy stout, it’s quite lite and consuming more than one pint wouldn’t be taxing at all. The oatmeal part is not overwhelming, providing a subtle flavour more than overpowering the rest of the beer. A quite nice midweek beer.
Vegan Lentil and Kidney Bean Shepherd’s Pie
This started with Michelle Bridges’ Lentil Shepherd’s Pie recipe: http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-nutrition/michelle-bridges-lentil-shepherds-pie-20120704-21g7d.html and ended up with this. I’ve made some modifications, e.g. making it Vegan.
The biggest modification is in the cauliflower topping. Like the original I avoided putting mashed potato on the top. This greatly reduces the calorie content, dose low-GI something and a million other things that people try and sell you in food bar form. Basically: cauliflower is awesome, let’s see what we can do with it.
This should be gluten free too…
This serves about 4 people.
Ingredients for the filling:
- 1/4 cup dried green lentils
- 1/4 cup dried red kidney beans
- 1 whole onion (small, peeled)
- 1 chopped onion
- 1 bay leaf (or 2, depending on size and your addiction to the awesomeness that is bay leaves)
- 1 large carrot, diced (I used a purple carrot, because, well, how awesome looking are they?)
- 1 zucchini, diced
- 1 capsicum, diced
- 1 garlic clove, crushed (I ended up using probably closer to 2.. but I like garlic)
- 400g can diced tomatoes
- 1tbsp oil (olive works, but Canola or similar should work fine too)
Ingredients: topping
- 1/2 head of cauliflower chopped/broken into florets (you can double this part of the recipe to have a nice side of the topping too.. which is rather yummy)
- 400g can of Butter beans, drained and rinsed
- Up to 1/4 cup nutritional yeast.
Serve with: steamed broccoli and green beans
The original recipe also used mushrooms and didn’t have the zucchini or capsicum. I didn’t have mushrooms (I’d eaten them all) but I did have zucchini and capsicum, and they’re yummy. So feel free to vary.
Method
You’re going to need a saucepan. Put the dried lentlis and dried kidney beans in it with 2-3 cups of water. Add the whole onion and bay leaf, bring to the boil and simmer for 40+ minutes, until the lentils and kidney beans are tender. When done, if there is an excess of water, drain it. You’ll want to have about 1/4 cup of liquid left in there. Remove the onion and bay leaf from the pot.
Pro tip: sprinkle a small amount of salt on the onion and eat it. Deny that it ever existed and enjoy your mid-cooking snack.
The original recipe used all lentils instead of half with kidney beans. I like red kidney beans. If you don’t use red kidney beans and just use lentils, the simmering time is probably the original 40mins, while it took a bit longer for mine – maybe 50 (it’s easy to tell. attempt to eat one of the kidney beans :)
At the same time, you want to grab the cauliflower and steam it for about 15 minutes. You want it to be very soft, you’re going to be mashing it (so if it’s not done at 15, wait a little longer).
Get a bowl that’s good for mashing and put the cauliflower in it. Add the butter beans (you may want to zap them in a microwave for up to 1 minute to get them warmer and easier to mash). Mash the two together, adding the nutritional yeast and perhaps a small amount of salt. The nutritional yeast will give a cheese-like flavour without, well, being cheese. I added the nutritional yeast a bit gradually and tasted along the way to get it right. You’ll know when you start to get close, as you’ll start getting this kind of creamy cheesey cauliflower taste.
In a large frying pan, add some oil (about 1tbsp is fine) and cook the onion, carrot, zucchini and capsicum until they start to soften, stirring regularly (this could be ~10mins). Add the tomatoes, lentils and kidney beans, season with salt and black pepper to taste. Depending on how much liquid was left in your lentil and kidney bean pot, you may need to add a little. Transfer to an oven proof dish, topping with the cauliflower+butter bean mash.
If you like, sprinkle some bread crumbs (or those gluten free quinoa crumbs that Ogram sells) on the top, and bung it in a 180C oven for anywhere from 15-30 minutes to get things all warm, a bit golden and depending on how hungry you are :)
Plate it all up and you can end up with something like this (cell phone pic, with awful white balance, lighting and generally the worst photo I’ve ever taken):
We really enjoyed this, and if you’re looking for a good sized plate of food that checks in at (i think) around 400calories, there you go.
Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Tadcaster Taddy Porter
I had this one a few days ago. When I was last in Acland Cellars I saw a bunch of Samuel Smith’s beer, and I noticed the small Vegan symbol on the back. Not one to shy away from vegan beer, I bought one of each I could see.
Beer doesn’t have to be explicitly labelled to be vegan, basically what you’re wanting to avoid is isinglass (obtained from dried swim bladders from fish) that is used as a fining agent.
Pro tip: if your beer has a bit of sediment in it (like Coopers does), it’s near 100% likely to be vegan (barring honey or somebody inventing a way to put bacon in beer).
A fining agent will accelerate the settling (clarification) of beer. If you’ve ever bottled your own homebrew, you’ll have noticed that the first 90% of bottles look a lot clearer than the last 10% (here you’re starting to stir up the sediment at the bottom of the brewing vessel). This then settles in the bottle and isn’t a problem – just don’t drink the last half mouthful. This is natural beer – “bottle conditioned”. Mass produced beers (think VB/Carlton/XXXX, not Coopers) are likely to use a fining agent such as isinglass as this enables them to pump out the beer quicker and not have to produce bottles that can withstand the pressure of secondary fermentation.
Pro tip: “bottle conditioned” likely means vegan too.
Basically, being vegan is a great excuse to not drink lots of shit beer.
Anyway, this is the beer I had the other night, and it was quite a pleasant porter. yay!
The Age (Fairfax) picks up on Telstra NextG ‘stalking’
It took a while, but it’s there. There is a mention of Netsweeper and that they provide products and services to Yemen, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates but it misses what these products are really for.
Jenkins Bazaar plugin 1.19
I recently released a new version of the Bazaar plugin for Jenkins. This release was inspired by a problem we noticed at Percona. It is:
- run “bzr revert” after a pull, as if you have a directory that is removed and re-added while having unknown files in said directory (e.g. build artifacts), you would end up in a very bad place (this is a BZR bug, so we work-around it with a “bzr revert”).
The update has already appeared in the Jenkins update centre, so you should already be able to upgrade to it.
New libeatmydata release!
I updated the web site for libeatmydata (woah!): http://flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/ and the launchpad page: https://launchpad.net/libeatmydata to reflect this too.
New exciting things in the land of libeatmydata:
- sync_file_range is now wrapped (thanks to Phillip Susi)
- I now bundle the eatmydata helper script originally included in the debian packages
- the autotools foo builds on MacOS X
- I modified the eatmydata helper script to also do the right DYLD environment variables if it’s running on Darwin. i.e. the eatmydata helper script now runs on MacOS X too (well, it should – please test)
- libeatmydata should now work just about everywhere that can LD_PRELOAD. Patches welcome.
If anyone knows how to build a non-versioned shared libray using autotools… I’d love to hear it. libeatmydata is totally not something that needs soname versioning. I guess it’s harmless though.
Hopus
It’s Belgian, described as “strong bitter and blond” and damn tasty. Damn, damn tasty. I’d really like more of this.
New York Times Curried Cauliflower Soup
I made the Curried Cauliflower Soup I found on the New York Times website:Â http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/health/nutrition/curried-cauliflower-soup-recipes-for-health.html
Rather delicious I have to say. In the future, I aim to try adding some peas, maybe some parsnip or even carrot.
Damn delicious though.
Chickpea and green bean curry
Ingredients
oil (olive, canola, whatever you like)
2 tsp mustard seeds
1 onion (chopped)
2 cloves garlic
1 dried chilli (crushed/chopped) – or more, depending on heat preference and heat of chilli
2 teaspoon chopped ginger
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
2 good handfulls of green beans, chopped into inch long pieces
1 can chickpeas (drained, washed)
1 can diced tomatoes
Method
Put oil in saucepan, add the mustard seeds
As the mustard seeds start to pop, add the chopped onion
Cook until onion is soft, then add all the spices
Stir and cook for ~30 seconds, until aromatic
Add can tomatoes, chickpeas and beans.
stir and cook until chickpeas are done and beans are a little softer, but still nice and crunchy (you can cook for longer if you like your green beans more well done, but I like a bit of crunch)
This took not much time, and was invented this evening purely because earlier in the day I had felt the need for green beans.
Nutrition
This serves about 2-3 people (depending on how much you eat). For 3ppl, it’s about 215 calories and 9g of protein per serve.
Not a good week for Telstra and privacy
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner just posted this:Â http://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media_releases/media_release_120629_telstra_breaches_privacy_act.html
This isn’t to do with what I’ve posted about here the past few days, but to do with an incident back in December 2011. The details of  734,000 customers were available publicly on the Internet.
Details exposed include:
- Name
- phone numbers
- Services held
- free text field (where information such as username, password, email or other information could be recorded)
The ACMA report says that up to 41,000 customers had their user names and passwords exposed.
So… who had access? I quote from the ACMA report:
Between 3 June 2011 and 8 December 2011, the Visibility Tool received 108 access requests per day from unrecognised IP addresses (IP addresses that cannot be conclusively identified as Telstra IP addresses). On the day of the media publication, this number increased to 20,498 access requests.
The information was available from 29th March 2011 through 9th December 2011 with from a date in October it being easier to access (via a google search).
Unfortunately this is yet another case of internal procedures failing and being inadequate and only when the issue was raised publicly (in Whirlpool and the media) was it swiftly fixed.
It can be hard for a person inside a company to speak up, continue to speak up and be an asshole on these issues. It’s just human nature and after all, annoying your boss isn’t what everybody wants to do all day at work. I hope that the improvements that Telstra has committed to as a result of this investigation make it easier for people to raise such problems and ensure they are resolved.
Achieving things inside large companies can be incredibly hard. I have sometimes felt I’ve had more success trying to convince a dead seal to go for a walk than to get a large company to fix something that’s obviously broken (and everybody knows it). Undoubtedly there were people inside Telstra who knew about the problem yet felt powerless to force a fix to happen. This kind of culture is poisonous and tricky to avoid in a large organisation.
Both ACMA (Australian Communications) and OAIC have full reports:
- ACMA Press release:Â http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD..PC/pc=PC_410412
- ACMA Report:Â http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib410234/mr48-2012-telstra_report.pdf
- http://www.oaic.gov.au/publications/reports/own_motion_telstra_bundles_June_2012.html
If we are extrapolate out for the latest incident (NextG and Netsweeper) we could expect:
- Telstra Incident report in ~2 months
- If ACMA or OAIC take action, a report in ~6months
Monk’s Stout Dupont
A fairly nice stout… although not enough to dislodge my favourite go-to stouts (hint: not the watery rubbish that passes for Guinness).
Telstra has a database of your NextG web activity
So, in what must be my biggest blog day ever, Telstra posted this:Â http://exchange.telstra.com.au/2012/06/28/further-update-telstra-smart-controls-cyber-safety-tool/
What is clear from their previous post and the pickup in the media (including ABC, Crikey and news.com.au) is that people care about this, a lot.
What is also clear is that they’ve had to go and talk to the Privacy Commissioner, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.
I’d like to thank Senator Ludlam for raising this with Telstra government affairs which without a doubt helped raise the profile of this issue.
There are a couple of issues with Telstra’s updated statement:
- They admit to constructing a database with your full query string and IP address
- They don’t address the moral issue of being involved with a company so involved in curtailing human rights (Netsweeper).
- Just stripping out the query string doesn’t erase all personal information
I don’t think we can ignore any of these problems, and I hope we get good responses and resolutions to them.
The significance of point 1 should not be understated. This means that some people, somewhere, have access to a decent amount of your browsing history. There is no details on who has access to this (hint: law enforcement could probably request it). There is also no explanation about why this was applied to everyone.
Update: after rereading their blog post, at best I can say it’s ambiguous on if they stored this or not. One sentence implies that they do, another implies that they don’t. Clarification would be most welcome, and given the history so far, we should not assume the best.
Personally, I’m really disappointed in Telstra for at any point thinking it’s okay to finance human rights abuses. I’m also really disappointed in world governments for permitting the sale of such software to those who use it to oppress their people. We should be in the business of exporting freedom and democracy, not exporting tyranny and oppression.
If you have a NextG handset, I strongly suggest the following:
- iOS device users (iPad and iPhone): Go look at Onion Browser
- Android users: read my post http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2012/06/28/tor-firefox-twitter-not-rooted-android-awesome/
New Jenkins Bazaar plugin release! 1.18
From the desk of your new Bazaar plugin for Jenkins maintainer, I give you Version 1.18.
This release has two good bug fixes:
- UI fix for checkout option (JENKINS-12261)
- Auto-recover from corrupt BZR branches (e.g. bzr branch/checkout killed at inopportune moment) by cleaning the workspace and trying again (this is now default behaviour, best used with the Jenkins SCM retry count feature being > 1)
We’ve been running the same code as this release at Percona for about 2 months now (the second bugfix was one I wanted to test first before submitting upstream). This is the big fix that fixed all our problems with using bazaar with Jenkins in a large deployment.
The other news? I’m now maintainer, and this is my first release.
The page on the Jenkins wiki is here:
and updates should come through the standard Jenkins channels as all the auto-foo happens.
Hacking the Jenkins BZR plugin
For Drizzle and for all of the projects we work on at Percona we use the Bazaar revision control system (largely because it’s what we were using at MySQL and it’s what MySQL still uses). We also use Jenkins.
We have a lot of jobs in our Jenkins. A lot. We build upstream MySQL 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6, Percona Server 5.1, Percona Server 5.5, XtraBackup 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1. For each of these we also have the normal trunk builds as well as parameterised ones that allow a developer to test out a tree before they ask for it to be merged. We also have each of these products across seven operating systems and for each of those both x86 32bit and 64bit. If we weren’t already in the hundreds of jobs, we certainly are once you multiply out between release and debug and XtraBackup being across so many MySQL and Percona Server versions.
I honestly would not be surprised if we had the most jobs of any user of the Bazaar plugin to Jenkins, and we’re probably amongst the top few of all Jenkins installations.
So, in August last year we discovered a file descriptor leak in the Bazaar plugin. Basically, garbage collection doesn’t get kicked off when you run out of file descriptors. This prevented us from even starting back up Jenkins until I found and fixed the bug. Good times.
We later hit a bug that was triggered in the parallel loading of jobs during startup. We could get stuck in an infinite loop during Jenkins starting that would just eat CPU and get nowhere. Luckily Jenkins provides a workaround: specify “-Djenkins.model.Jenkins.parallelLoad=false” as an argument and it just does it single threaded. For us, this solves that problem.
We were also hitting another problem. If you kill bzr at just the wrong time, you can leave the repository in not an entirely happy state. An initial branch can be killed at a time where it’ll think it’s a repository rather than a checkout and there’s a bunch of other weirdness (including file system corruption if you happen to use bad VM software).
The way we were solving this was to sometimes go and “clean workspace” on the jobs that needed it (annoying with matrix builds). We’d switched to just doing “clean tree” for a bunch of builds. The problem with doing a clean tree was that “bzr branch” to check out the source code could take a very long time – especially for Percona Server which is a branch of MySQL and hence has hundreds of megabytes of history.
We couldn’t use bzr shared repositories as we kept hitting concurrency bugs when more than one jenkins job was trying to do a bzr operation at the same time (common when matrix builds kick off builds for release and debug for example).
So.. I fixed that in the Jenkins bazaar plugin too (which should be in an upcoming release) and we’ve been running it on our Jenkins instance for the past ~2 months.
Basically, if we fail to check out the Bazaar tree, we wipe it clean and try again (Jenkins has a “retry count” for source checkouts). This is a really awesome form of self healing. Even if the bazaar team fixed all the bugs, we’d still have to go and get that new version of bzr on all our build machines – including ancient systems such as CentOS 5. Not as much fun as bashing your head into a vice.
After all of that, I seem to now be the maintainer of the Bazaar plugin for Jenkins as Monty pointed out I was using it a lot more than him and kept finding and fixing bugs.
Soooo… say hello to the new Jenkins Bazaar plugin maintainer, me.
Yes, I maintain Java code now. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Tor + Firefox + Twitter + (not rooted) Android = awesome
Update: As of October 2015, you should likely install the OrFox browser which is from The Tor Project and is a port of the Tor Browser to Android. Installing OrBot and OrFox makes browsing through Tor on an Android device easy. The rest of this blog entry is left in-tact for historical record, but as of now, look at OrFox rather than this process.
This is actually pretty simple to get going once you know how. This is a short “HOWTO use Tor on Android”
Basic problem: I want to use Tor on my phone. If you’re wondering why, perhaps my previous posts on Telstra and what they do to your traffic may be a good hint.
First of all, you’re going to want to install OrBot. It’s available from the Google Play store. There is absolutely no harm in leaving this running all the time in the background. I have found it to have zero impact on battery life of my phone (the Battery thing in settings doesn’t show OrBot at all).
With OrBot running, you now have a HTTP and SOCKS proxy available on your phone. This means you can set any app that can use a HTTP or SOCKS proxy to do their Internet access through Tor instead of directly through your Wifi or cellular network.
The Twitter client wonderfully has built in support for using a HTTP proxy. You just need to go into the Twitter app’s Settings, click “Enable HTTP Proxy”, and set “Proxy Host” to localhost and “Proxy Port” to 8118. You are now done. You can test this by disabling OrBot and then trying to refresh your Twitter stream. If it doesn’t work, then Twitter is trying to use the (not running) Tor proxy. Re-enable OrBot to be able to use your Twitter client. This “just works”.
There is pretty much no excuse not to have your phone Twitter client go through Tor. We all know that Twitter gets all sorts of legal queries for information about users. We also know that they’ve been fairly good about it, and indeed hats off to Twitter for being awesome. But… guess what? We can just ensure they don’t have any information worth handing over :)
Next step… Web Browsing. The Firefox Beta is pretty awesome. It’s fast and usable (which is exactly what you want in a web browser). This may also work with the standard Firefox browser (I’m not sure when they’ve updated it to be on par with the Firefox Beta version I’ve been using).
There is no place to specify proxy settings in the normal UI (I do hope Mozilla add this). But not to worry, Firefox on Android is built on the same base as Firefox on the desktop, so it does support it (there just isn’t a good UI).
What you need to do is go to the URL bar and go to “about:config”. This shows every little thing you can tweak in Firefox (a lot). Luckily, there’s a search bar. Search for “proxy” and modify the following settings to the following values (the = sign means “click modify and enter the value after the =”):
- network.proxy.http = 127.0.0.1
- network.proxy.http_port = 8118
- network.proxy.socks = 127.0.0.1
- network.proxy.socks_port = 9050
- network.proxy.ssl = 127.0.0.1
- network.proxy.ssl_port = 8118
- network.proxy.type = 1
- UPDATED: network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to “true†(click “toggle”)
Then head to http://check.torproject.org to check that it’s working!
This doesn’t provide you with all the features and benefits of using the TorButton in the desktop firefox, but it will stop your mobile phone provider spying on all the web sites you visit (unless they break into your phone itself).
Luckily, Android is fairly awesome and whenever you try to open a URL it can ask you what program you want to use to do that with. Guess what? Just select the Firefox you configured with Tor to open it and you’re browsing through Tor. Brilliant and easy with no need to go and “root your phone” or anything else that may turn people off from doing so.
Update: Thanks should also go to François Marier for his site that helped me get this right: http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/browsing-privacy-and-ad-blocking-on.html
Update: Added setting of socks_remote_dns
Telstra stops tracking, still supporting Netsweeper
http://www.zdnet.com.au/telstra-halts-customer-tracking-339340404.htm
The big news:
“We are stopping all collection of website addresses for the development of this new product,” Telstra said in a statement.
This does not change their association (and presumed financial support) of Netsweeper, helping make its technology affordable to its government customers who use it to suppress free speech and access to information.
See also:
- http://www.zdnet.com.au/telstra-halts-customer-tracking-339340404.htm
- http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/news/national/article/146369–canadian-online-censor-netsweeper-under-scrutiny
- http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2012/06/26/telstra-funding-censorship-in-middle-east/
- http://exchange.telstra.com.au/2012/06/27/update-on-telstras-mobile-cyber-safety-tool/
Telstra funding censorship in Middle East
This post inspired by https://twitter.com/BernardKeane/status/217535549731389440
So, we know that Netsweeper is used by Telstra -Â http://www.zdnet.com.au/telstra-logs-customer-history-for-new-filter-339340337.htm
We know that Netsweeper is used in Qatar, the UAE and Yemen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship – see also http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/local/article/577673–aiding-repression-or-just-doing-business ) and these states use it to suppress free speech and access to information.
The majority of countries that implement suppression of free speech on the internet could not afford the high cost of developing such software. The only thing that makes it possible is the subsidies from companies in the free world. With Telstra using Netsweeper, they directly contribute to the development costs of this software.
In years gone past free speech was suppressed by members of secret police and guns. Now you can do a lot of that with software. Software that is made affordable because the development costs are shared with companies such as Telstra.
See also my last two posts on the topic:
An update on Telstra’s surveillance of what you do online
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/306441,telstra-tracks-users-to-build-web-filter.aspx
I’d suggest going and reading:Â http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin/Â to learn a bit about anonymization failures.
What we know:
- Telstra has the ability to monitor every URL you visit on a NextG connection
- Telstra is, in fact, monitoring every URL you visit through your NextG connection and piping that to some computer system that then takes action on it.
- None of this was disclosed to customers.
- Telstra is building a system for censorship.
What we don’t know:
- If this is a violation of any Australian privacy law (I’m not a lawyer)
- Who else has access to this “anonymised” data (hellooo US legal system)
- What universal surveillance infrastructure they have running
Update: this is a followup from yesterday’s post:Â http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2012/06/25/on-telstra-tracking-nextg-http-requests/